I know this question isn't strictly to to do with a current hard drive problem, so I hope I'm not violating a rule here, but I thought maybe someone wouldn't mind telling me if there's any potential problems with OS mirrored drives if I ever have to reinstall the OS. Specifically, I have some drives mirrored in Windows 7-64 (Ultimate) and I'd like to know if they'll be fine if I ever have to reinstall Windows. Would I have to set up the mirrors again? If so, could I lose data? (Obviously so if I had to reformat the disks!)

Hope this isn't too stupid a question! I'm a complete noob with all this.

TIA!

Your question is a bit un structured. You said you have some(how many) mirrored in windows(using windows dynamic disk technology?)
Please be a bit more specific in your setup.

Usually you would have 2, 3 or 4 hard drives set up on a raid using a normal motherbaord that supports RAID. That is hardware raid and setup in the BIOS before any OS.

If you have software raid created in Windows of other hard drives not including(which is impossible anyway) the system one- it is possible you could loose the data. Unless you know how to reconstruct the drives in windows again.

Hope that helps a bit

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Hi, thanks for the response. I have four drives (none of them the system drive, I'm just using 4 extra for storage), and I'm using the OS to mirror them - yes, using dynamic disc technology. So basically two drives are being mirrored to two other drives. I was hoping that the System Volume Information stored on the hard drives would contain the information the OS would need to recognize the drives current configuration if I ever had to do an OS reinstall, but I don't know for sure.

Well, from what I can gather, if I had to do an OS install, I could use the same drives without data loss. The drives would be flagged on the GUI list as “foreign”. Then you right-click on the drives and go to “Import Foreign Disks…” and follow the prompts.

Just in case- clone your original system if shit hits the fan afterwards.. These windows raid things tend to go pear shaped...

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It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
Picasaweb- Pictures and movies | Dropbox - Documents and other..